Biden

As we head into yet another election season, faced with what looks like an inevitable Trump-Biden rematch, it’s hard not to despair at the divided state of the nation. A quick scan of the political landscape, and the condition of our cities, leaves me struggling — everything seems fractured. It’s like a broken mirror: the shattered remains are all reflecting back at each other, bouncing light everywhere. We live in an America that seems familiar, but only because it’s composed of the broken shards of something that once was. There is a lot of talk about how America is in decline. This was a central theme in the first GOP debate. It was presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis’s opening line: “Our country is in decline, this decline is not inevitable, it’s a choice.

The US economy is faltering, crime is through the roof, the border is a disaster, everyone hates the vice president and Democrats are not backing off one inch on transgenderism. Only one Republican could lose to President Joe Biden next year. But Democrats’ trump card is, well, Trump. Infallible two-step Biden re-election plan. Step one: trick Republicans into nominating Trump. Step two: that’s about it. I still don’t think Trump will be the nominee, but never underestimate Republicans’ ability to embrace the worst possible thing, especially with conservative media wildly cheerleading the worst possible thing.

Ever since Biden took office, immigration has been one of those things his administration would rather not talk about. It’s not hard to understand why. The polls show a consistent and heavy slant in favor of the Republican Party on the issue; internal Democratic Party divisions (between pro-immigration liberals and open-border absolutists) make for awkward conversations; and a president and party that opted for moral outrage on the issue in opposition struggled with the transition to power — which brings with it the difficult tradeoffs inherent to immigration policymaking.

Maybe Niccolò Machiavelli was not the first political consultant, but he remains one of the best. Ron DeSantis might solicit his advice before deciding whether a 2024 campaign for the White House is wise. DeSantis could start with the penultimate chapter of The Prince, “What Fortune can do in human affairs, and how it can be resisted,” which is famous for its imagery. Machiavelli first likens fortune to a raging river, whose flood cannot be met head on but whose fury can be dissipated by dams and dykes built in advance. Later he says Fortune is a woman who yields to a young man who comes on strong, even roughly. The lesson for a forty-four-year-old DeSantis is obvious: seize the moment. She’s yours for the taking — if you’re bold.

It’s almost spring, and you know what that means: buds popping on the trees, birds chirping as the days grow longer, and the president introducing a budget that will be quickly forgotten. And so it's happened. But there have been a few interesting twists that could make this budget season more interesting than most. President Biden wrote an op-ed for the Wednesday New York Times presenting his plan to “extend Medicare for another generation.” The piece was largely predictable: calls to raise taxes on the wealthy as a way “to increase the program’s solvency by twenty-five years.” While some fiscal conservatives welcomed the president’s willingness to raise the issue of Medicare solvency, his ideas are largely dead on arrival for Republicans.

Biden delivered a strategy-free State of the Union The loudest line of Tuesday’s State of the Union was ad-libbed. “Name me a world leader who’s change places with Xi Jinping,” he shouted in a departure from his prepared text. “Name me one, name me one.” There may not have been a Chinese spy balloon drifting above the United States as Biden was speaking, but foreign policy hung awkwardly over the president’s address. In the wake of a major spat with America’s most powerful adversary and in the longest speech of his presidency, Biden spent about as much time talking about hotel resort fees as he did discussing the US’s relationship with China.

Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of national politics. Barack Obama should have been the beginning of a generational renewal for the Democratic Party. Instead the Democrats have been prisoners of their past. They looked backward in 2016 and nominated Hillary Clinton. After she failed, they reached even further back to nominate Joe Biden, a man born during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Biden is not simply old; he’s nostalgia personified. He’s a throwback to a time when Democrats were less radical, when the party of FDR and JFK, and even of Bill Clinton, could lay claim to being an everyman’s party.